This application is related to U.S. Pat. No. 8,660,055, the entire contents of which are incorporated here for reference.
It has become commonplace to use devices employing point-to-point wireless communications technologies to create a personal area network in the vicinity of a user of personal electronic devices carried about by the user (referred to by some as a “piconet”) to convey audio from one of those personal electronic devices to one or both ears of the user, as in the case of the playback of audio stored on an audio playing device to the user. It has also become commonplace to additionally convey audio from the user to one of those personal electronic devices, as in the case of cell phone in which the user engages in telephonic communication through such point-to-point wireless communications with that device. Among the forms of such point-to-point wireless communications being used for such purposes are those that conform to the widely used Bluetooth® specification promulgated by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group of Bellevue, Wash. References to Bluetooth® in this application should be understood to refer to version 5 of the Bluetooth core specification; version 1.3.1 of the A2DP profile specification; version 1.6.1 of the AVRCP profile specification; version 1.7.1 of the HFP profile specification; version 1.4 of the AVCTP protocol specification; version 1.3 of the AVDTP protocol specification; version 1.2 of the RFCOMM specification, or to later versions that implement the relevant components of the technology in the same or similar manner.
Wireless communications conforming to the Bluetooth specification have been in use for some time to wirelessly convey two-way audio between cell phones and so-called “earpieces” that incorporate both an acoustic driver to output audio to an ear of a user and a microphone to receive audio from the mouth of the user. More recently, there has been a growing emergence of audio playing devices employing wireless communications conforming to the Bluetooth specification to wirelessly convey one-way audio from those devices to one or more acoustic drivers to output audio to one or both ears of a user.
Unfortunately, despite the growing acceptance of such point-to-point wireless communications for the conveying of audio between personal electronic devices, the point-to-point nature, the procedures required to securely establish wireless connections, and the conversions of audio between various analog and digital forms have presented various difficulties. Those difficulties include various impediments to providing audio to both ears of a user, allowing a user to easily transition from one choice of acoustic driver and/or microphone to another, and sharing audio with a personal electronic device carried by another user.
The '055 patent described a way to allow two separate wireless devices, such as one for each ear of a single user, or separate headphone devices of two different users, to receive audio signals transmitted from a single source device, where the source device is only aware of a single communication link, as Bluetooth did not then (and still does not) provide for the direct transmission of audio data to two receiving devices simultaneously. In recent years, several fully wireless earphone devices have come on the market, but it is the applicant's understanding that most of these do not transmit from the source to both receiving devices, as in the '055 patent, but instead re-transmit audio from a first receiving device to any additional receiving devices.